"You'll have one friend out there...God."

Rating: 5/10 (2 December 2006)

Nazi-Occupied France during the fifth year of the second World War, 1944, detailing the strategies of the British and American troops and their historic invasion on Normandy. One of those war epics which takes place in the 1940s and is written and directed just as squarely as similar movies from that era, with purple prose taking the place of real dialogue, and famous faces popping up just long enough for the audience to recognize them (there's Sal Mineo!) before the editor moves along to the next pedagogic vignette. The film is certainly epic-scaled, but the subplots early on involving the French Resistance and the decoy paratroopers are lumped together without much style. Critics usually trip over themselves with heightened accolades for well-meaning event-movies such as this ("A masterpiece!" or "The greatest WWII film ever made!"), but the portentous drum beat at the very beginning (and the star-sightings within the first ten minutes) signal what lies ahead: a commercial Hollywood package with 'a serious side', designed as a war document but really meant for mass consumption. The milieu seems right, and the Oscar-nominated cinematography is fine, but the dialogue is ripe with overeager passion, and the casting is certainly odd (John Wayne drawls his lines as if he were still out West, while Richard Burton appears intermittently to deliver bizarre, studio-set soliloquies on the atrocities of battle). The mechanics of the film are not very engrossing or surprising; there are brief flashes of weary war-time humor and some beautiful images, but there are no memorable characters or exciting sequences beyond the derailing of a train. Curiously, the movie is timid in dealing with the Nazis (is the word ever uttered?) and in showing the swastika symbol (it gets a close-up near the beginning, but is otherwise tough to spot). The bulk of the screenplay by Cornelius Ryan, based upon his own book, is given over to theatrical vitriol or melancholy, and all human interaction is woefully stilted. ** from ****